Pages

Wednesday, May 4, 2016

The Expiration / Retention Policy, part of the Information management policy settings, can be useful to start a workflow on items / documents at an expiration date, based on a logic retention period. This is a robust mechanisme based on a timer job that will process a queue. In this way archiving or other scheduled processing can be started for even large amounts of items / documents "at once".
In SharePoint Online the retention timer job is fired only once a week and only 2010 workflows can be started through this mechanisme. But with the new (in preview) service Flow it's possible to create your own timer jobs to schedule 2013 workflows on lists / libraries in SharePoint Online.

Start a logic flow from scratch and select the Recurrence option to start from (as the trigger).

Select a frequency (unit of time) and an interval, for example every 1 Day.

Choose as action 'SharePoint Online - Create item' in a list at a specific site url.
Add a workflow to this list that will automatically start when a new item is created. From this workflow the processing of items in another list can be initiated.
Here is some inspiration to get this dirty job done: